Modeling with Primitives

CAGD230: Primitives

Assignment Details: To get used to modeling, our first assignment is to build a simple scene using the basic shapes in Maya. We could not mess with the shape's vertexes, faces, or edges. We also couldn't edit their mesh. The tools available were mainly moving, rotating, and scaling. But it is still possible to build details and complexity off basic shapes, it just takes... more shapes.

The scene I built is a city, or rather, one street of a city. The shape I used the most would definitely be a cube. It's scaled to be a rectangle or a box but there are possibly around 300-400 cubes in the scene. The buildings would be the most obvious cube-primitive structures. There's also the awnings on the bottom half of most buildings. The point of the awnings were to show more detail than just a basic door. Rather than a simple building, some of the buildings look like storefronts especially similar to buildings in Chinatown. Windows took up most of the cube-primitives. Rather than using a plane, using cubes as windows felt more natural. Planes made rather flat windows, metaphorically and literally. I actually had trouble with texturing and adding materials. It was difficult making mainly the windows shine but it turns out the buildings and the sidewalk will have to too. This was before learning how to properly UV and texturing but I am pretty disappointed that the buildings and sidewalk reflect. The most detailed object is probably the smallest. It's the water towers and there's only two. One might be more noticeable than the other. They look possibly the longest to make because I was experimenting with snaps. Although it's not noticeable, they do look rather good for being made out of basic primitives. It's the littlest things that count.